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Colbert cuts to the chase: ‘On Krypton, do they speak Spanish?’

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Diaz, an MIT professor who serves on the advisory board of Freedom University, a Georgia organization that provides college-level instructions to all qualified students, regardless of their immigration status, appeared last night on The Colbert Report to discuss immigration reform. As Diaz and host Stephen Colbert “debated” a pathway to citizenship and a guest worker program, the conversation soon turned to … the Superman Question.

“Every generation of Americans has to answer what we call ‘the Superman Question,'” Diaz said. “Superman comes, lands in America, he’s illegal, he’s one of these kids, wrapped up in a red bullfighter’s cape. You’ve got to decide what we’re going to do with Superman. Are we going to give him the boot and say, ‘You know what, you’re an illegal, you’re not an American,’ or are we going to have compassion and say, Listen, this kid was brought here before he knew, this could was brought here and he didn’t have a say in whether he was going to come, but he’s living in this country and –”

However, at that point, Colbert interrupted with a pressing question: “On Krypton, do they speak Spanish?”

“That’s the eternal question,” Diaz conceded, leaving the debate to rage on while undoubtedly frustrating comic-book fans (everybody knows that on Krypton they speak Kryptonian or Kryptonese).